In my previous planned and on-topic post, the “The Mutual “Inness” of the Human and the Divine” of September 30, I said that in this post I would “have something to say about the ‘fall’ and [about] our having ‘become forgetful beings’” that I quoted Nasr speaking about. I think now, however, that before I do that, it will be better if in this post I take up Nasr’s thesis that we have a “pre-eternal existence,” a thesis that he brought up before he brought up the “fall” and our “forgetfulness.” Our temporal existence, after all, would be the existence we have after the fall in question.
Nasr brings up our “pre-eternal existence” in the following paragraph (The Garden of Truth, p. 5), already quoted in the previous post.
Not only were we created by God, but we have the root of our existence here and now in Him. When we bore witness to His Lordship as mentioned in the Quranic verse, “Am I not your Lord?” the world and all that is in it were not as yet created. Even now we have our pre-eternal existence in the Divine Presence, and we have made an eternal covenant with God, which remains valid beyond the contingencies of our earthly life and beyond the realm of space and time in which we now find ourselves.
He has not, at least up to this point in The Garden of Truth, offered us a full spelling out of just what “pre-eternal” means in his vocabulary. But it is clear, from the claim that “[w]hen we bore witness to [God…] the world and all that is in it were not as yet created,” that we existed, that we were, when creation took place. Let me hypothesize, that is, that he holds that, enjoying a “pre-eternal existence,” we existed “in the beginning.” Or, let me put it the other way around: “in the beginning were we.”
I am, of course, hypothesizing that there is a parallel between Nasr’s understanding of human beings, even in our plurality (thus the “we”), and the understanding of the “Word,” i.e., Jesus, expressed in the Gospel of John, 1:1 and 1:2.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
(I have used the “New International Version” translation, at: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/search=John+1&version=NIV)
I don’t know to what degree the parallel is intentional or to what degree it can be extended. I have no reason, at least as of now, to think that Nasr thought that we human beings, even in our plurality, have a role in creation that the Gospel of John 1:3 assigns to the “Word” or Jesus:
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
Yet, it seems clear, in the beginning were we. And there is more. As the Nasr paragraph quoted above quite unambiguously says, we clearly were and are with God, “in the Divine Presence.” There is moreover, the thesis of Nasr, which I have dubbed theomonism, according to which there is, “ultimately,” but one and only one real being and that being is God. Someone adhering to that thesis is saying (on the further assumption that we in fact exist) that we are God. (I discuss Nasr’s theomonism in the “The Mutual “Inness” of the Human and the Divine” of September 30th and earlier in the “Nasr’s Gnosis and “Theomonism” of June 28th, 2009.)
Nasr, in other words and in summary, could have said:
In the beginning were we, and we were with God, and we were God. We were with God in the beginning.
There is yet more. In a previously discussed (in the “Where We Are Coming from and Where We Are Going to: 6″ of August 23) paragraph (The Garden of Truth, p. 7), Nasr himself draws explicit attention to the parallel:
Now, no matter how we seek to go back to the origin of our consciousness, we cannot reach its beginning in time, and the question again arises what our consciousness, its origin, and its end are. The spiritual practices of every authentic path, including Sufism, enable those who follow and practice them earnestly and under the appropriate conditions to gain new levels of consciousness and ultimately to become aware that consciousness has no beginning in time (but only in God) because “in the beginning was consciousness,” and it has no temporal end because “in the end is consciousness.”
Questions abound. What is the relationship of the consciousness of which he speaks and the conscious being(s) having that consciousness? What is the relationship of that consciousness to the Word of Christian theology? What is the relationship of that consciousness to Muhammad? What is the relationship of the Word of Christian theology to Muhammad? Etc. I am not yet prepared to answer them (though I have my hypotheses). But you may rest assured that I aim to do so in the future.
In my next planned and on-topic post, I will have something to say about Nasr’s theses of our “fall,” I assume we may put it, “out of” God and our having “become forgetful beings” as a consequence that I raised in the September 30th post.
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The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition
